Automatic Detection of Intimate Partner Violence Victims from Social Media for Proactive Delivery of Support.

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Yuting Guo, Emory University; Sangmi Kim, Emory University; Elise Warren, Emory University; Yuan-Chi Yang, Emory University; Sahithi Lakamana, Emory University; Abeed Sarker, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2023
• Publisher: AMIA
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: ©2023 AMIA - All rights reserved.
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc
• Volume: 2023
• Start Page: 254
• End Page: 260
• Grant/Funding Information: This study was funded by the Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory (IPRCE), Emory University.
• Keywords: Proactive Delivery of Support
• Research Categories: Engineering, Biomedical; Health Sciences, Nursing; Health Sciences, Public Health

Abstract

Social media platforms are increasingly being used by intimate partner violence (IPV) victims to share experiences and seek support. If such information is automatically curated, it may be possible to conduct social media based surveillance and even design interventions over such platforms. In this paper, we describe the development of a supervised classification system that automatically characterizes IPV-related posts on the social network Reddit. We collected data from four IPV-related subreddits and manually annotated the data to indicate whether a post is a self-report of IPV or not. Using the annotated data (N=289), we trained, evaluated, and compared supervised machine learning systems. A transformer-based classifier, RoBERTa, obtained the best classification performance with overall accuracy of 78% and IPV-self-report class 𝐹1 -score of 0.67. Post-classification error analyses revealed that misclassifications often occur for posts that are very long or are non-first-person reports of IPV. Despite the relatively small annotated data, our classification methods obtained promising results, indicating that it may be possible to detect and, hence, provide support to IPV victims over Reddit.